Lost-boy Lomong to carry U.S. flag

Wed Aug 6, 2008 3:18pm EDT
By Mitch Phillips

BEIJING (Reuters) - The United States chose former Sudanese refugee Lopez Lomong to carry their flag at Friday's Olympic opening ceremony in a move that could embarrass Sudan and its ally China.

Lomong, who spent 10 years in a refugee camp after fleeing his native Sudan as a child, was given the honor after a vote by the team captains of the entire U.S. Olympic squad.

"This is the most exciting day ever in my life," Lomong said in a statement by the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) on Wednesday.

"It is a great honor for me that my team mates chose to vote for me. The opening ceremony is the best day and the best moment of Olympic life," added the 23-year-old, who will race in the 1,500 meters.

Lomong fled on foot from rampaging government-sponsored Arab militias in southern Sudan at the age of six in 1991, becoming separated from his parents.

His escape took place during the height of a civil war between Sudan's Muslim, Arab north and its Christian and animist south.

He eventually reached Kenya where he lived in a refugee camp for 10 years, the USOC said.

Along with thousands of similar children, known as "the Lost Boys of Sudan", he was eventually resettled in the United States and became a U.S. citizen in July 2007.

"I'm here as an ambassador of my country and I will do everything I can to represent my country well," Lomong said.

"This is another amazing step for me in celebrating being an American."

Lomong will be one of three foreign-born athletes representing the U.S. in the 1,500 meters.

World champion Bernard Lagat, who won Olympic silver and bronze in the event for Kenya, and Leonel Manzano, who grew up in Mexico, complete the lineup.

While Lomong will no doubt be concentrating on trying to win his race, his selection is likely to provoke extensive debate about China's relations with Sudan.

China is a major investor in the Sudanese oil industry and sells arms to Khartoum. Critics say self-interest has led China to shield the Sudanese government from pressure over the conflict in the western region of Darfur.

Some 200,000 people have died and an estimated 2.5 million been made homeless in five years of conflict in Darfur, according to international experts.

Khartoum puts the death toll at 10,000.

Human rights campaigners are believed to be planning to highlight the plight of Darfur in the run-up to Friday's opening ceremony.

The United States said on Wednesday it would protest to China over its decision to revoke the visa of Olympic gold medalist Joey Cheek, an activist on Darfur.

Speedskater Cheek is co-founder of Team Darfur, an international coalition of athletes campaign to draw world attention to the humanitarian crisis there.

(Additional reporting by Simon Denyer; editing by Keith Weir)

Seattle Doctor Climbing World's Highest Peaks for Charity, Successfully Completes First Ascent

By Fred Jacobs

Dr. Boyer on Mt. McKinley

SEATTLE, Wa. — July 15, 2008 — Dr. Thomas Boyer, a physician specializing in emergency medicine, has successfully climbed Mt. McKinley, at 20,320 feet the highest peak in North America, the first in a series of ascents of the highest peaks on every continent in the world, including Mt. Everest. Dr. Boyer is climbing to raise funds to help amputees walk again, through his partnership with Seattle’s Prosthetics Outreach Foundation, an international humanitarian organization headquartered in Seattle. Only 45 other people in history have completed the challenge which Dr. Boyer has set for himself.

Says Dr. Boyer, “I have so much admiration for people who overcome challenges. To an amputee in a poor country with no healthcare system, the idea of walking again is about as big a challenge as climbing Mt. Everest. The Prosthetics Outreach Foundation has provided prosthetics limbs to over 14,000 amputees around the world during the past 20 years. I want to do whatever I can to help.”

On July 2, Dr. Boyer completed the first stage of his quest, with his successful ascent of Mt. McKinley (also known as Denali). The remaining peaks, known collectively with McKinley as “The Seven Summits,” are:

Europe: ............. Mt. Elbrus ................ 18,519 ft. ...... Aug. 2 - 15, 2008
Africa: ............... Mt. Kilimanjaro ....... 19,340 ft. ...... Aug. 16 - 24, 2008
S. America: ........ Mt. Aconcagua ......... 22,841 ft. ..... Nov. 28 - Dec. 21, 2008
Antarctica: ......... Mt. Vinson ............... 16,067 ft. ..... Jan. 2009
Asia & World: ..... Mt. Everest .............. 29,002 ft. .... Mar. - June 2009
Oceania: ............ Mt. Carstensz and .... 16,024 ft ...... Oct. 2009
........................... Mt. Kociuszko .......... 7,310 ft. ....... Oct. 2009

(There is debate over which seven peaks count as “the seven.” Some argue that Kosciuszko, the highest point in Australia, should be included. Others argue that Australia is not a continent, but that Australasia is, and that therefore Indonesia's Carstensz should be included. Dr. Boyer will climb all eight peaks.)

In addition to the above-named mountains, on August 26 - Oct 14 2008, Dr. Boyer will climb Cho Oyu in Nepal, the world’s sixth-highest peak at 26,906 ft., if the Chinese government opens the Tibetan borders.

“When Dr. Boyer said he wanted to make these climbs supporting our work providing prosthetic limbs to amputees in developing countries, I thought, this is going to help a lot of people walk,” said Fred Jacobs, Director of Development at the Prosthetics Outreach Foundation. “The money Tom raises will help war victims, accident victims, and children born with severe deformities. A few dollars worth of metal and plastic lets an amputee walk again, literally picking them up off the ground so they can support themselves and their family. They feel whole again, both physically and emotionally. The transformation is miraculous. I’m so excited about the good which is coming from these climbs. Our goal is to raise $150,000 in this campaign. One of our donors called it ‘unambiguously morally positive’ – I like that.”

........................................................................................................

The Prosthetics Outreach Foundation works tirelessly to promote the right to walk for the underserved in Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, and Vietnam.

This Seattle-based non-profit trains medical personnel in its focus countries to manufacture, fit, and distribute prosthetic limbs to amputees. The staff of Prosthetics Outreach Foundation adapts their methods to the local conditions of each target country, identifying which local materials will create the best prosthetic limbs. This organization also devotes their efforts to the eradication of clubfoot, an immobilizing birth defect, using the effective Ponseti treatment for early stage treatment and surgery when necessary. When medical care alone is not enough, Prosthetics Outreach Foundation offers microloans to its patients.

Bangladesh: Prosthetics Outreach Foundation provides prosthetic and orthotic care to amputees and others with limb deformities.

Sierra Leone: Civil war created thousands of amputees. Mr. Gabrilla Sesay calls the microloan he used to start his bike shop "the life cable of my life."


Sierra Leone: Single Leg Amputee Sports Club, a partner of Prosthetics Outreach Foundation, presents the Makeni Amputee Soccer Team.

Vietnam: A clubfoot patient before and after her corrective surgeries.

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How to Support the Campaign
Donations are currently being accepted online at http://www.pofsea.org/ . Click on the “Donate” button at the top of the page. Or, mail donations to Prosthetics Outreach Foundation, 400 East Pine St Suite 225, Seattle, WA 98122

Learn more about Prosthetics Outreach Foundation and see pictures of Dr. Boyer’s Mt. McKinley climb at http://www.pofsea.org/ .

Karadzic Captured in Serbia: Faces War Crimes and Genocide Charges

Radovan Karadzic was recently arrested in Belgrade, thirteen years after being indicted by the UN War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague. He faces "eleven counts of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and other atrocities". These charges were made over Karadzic's alleged involvement in the killing of 12,000 civilians in the seige of Sarajevo and the massacre of over 7,500 Bosnian Muslims and Croats. While he is being held now in a special war crimes court in Serbia, he is to be transferred to the UN War Crimes Court in the Hague.

So what does this mean for Serbia and the nations and people of former Yugoslavia?

For Serbia, Karadzic's arrest is part a process towards gaining EU membership. France now holds the rotating presidency of the EU, and French Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, has already said that a major obstacle has been lifted. In a country with 18.8% unemployment and only $10,400 GDP per capita, EU membership would provide much needed economic benefits. It also casts a positive light over a country recently marred in its world image by the declaration of independence in Kosovo.

For Bosnians and Serbs, it is a step towards reconciliation. Haris Silajdzic, Chairman of the Bosnian Presidency, said of the arrest, "I am glad that this will now open the way for better co-operation and improvement in this part of the world." There are still Serbian extremists who see Karadzic as a national hero and promise backlash.

For international justice as a whole, this is great news. International courts have faced major difficulties in getting results from their actions. Recently the International Criminal Court released arrest warrants for high up members of the Sudanese government, but the Sudanese have simply ignored them. Having a major war criminal charged with genocide brought to the Hague is a major step. Karadzic himself refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the Hague, telling the Times in 1996, "If The Hague was a real juridical body I would be ready to go there to testify or do so on television, but it is a political body that has been created to blame the Serbs." As the Serbian government sends him to the Netherlands, though, Karadzic will have to cope with the fact the the court he will face is very real, and so are their charges.

Serge Brammertz, head prosecutor for the UN War Crimes Tribunal, expressed optimism for the implications of Karadzic's arrest. "It is also an important day for international justice because it clearly demonstrates that nobody is beyond the reach of the law and that sooner or later all fugitives will be brought to justice."

Brown Takes Peace in Palestine Seriously

By Jackson Wyrick

In a bold step towards peace, United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown visited the West Bank city of Bethlehem and met with Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. Brown made some brave statements that aren't likely to increase his popularity in Israel.

Brown pledged the UK's support towards pursuing a peace with Israel based on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem being the capitol of both nations. For Israel, this would mean returning much of the land it seized in the 1967 war. It also leaves major problems to be solved, like sovereignty of holy sites in the Old City of Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives. Also, this would leave much of the West Bank divided by the Israeli "Security Barrier", which goes far into 1967 Palestine.

The "Security Barrier" is a controversial issue in itself. In 2004, the International Court of Justice ruled it to be illegal since it de facto annexed large portions of the West Bank into Israel and divided many Palestinian communities. Israel says they need the barrier because it has been effective in preventing suicide bombs, which it has. In general, Israelis prefer to call the barrier a fence, which it is for much of its length. Along major cities, though, the barrier is a 25 foot concrete wall, which is how most Palestinians refer to it. "But today the wall here is graphic evidence of the urgent need for justice for the Palestinian people and an end to the occupation," said Brown.

What is so bold about Brown's talk was that he approached it with one thing in mind: peace for Israel and Palestine. He did not worry about using the politically correct language or avoiding verbal taboos, which are all to common in the Middle East. He simply looked for how to make progress towards peace, and to do that, he was willing to call a wall a wall, or say that peace can't come until average Palestinians see improving economic conditions. He emphasized the importance of providing Palestinians with "jobs, housing, and basic services," something many Palestinians are without.

Another bold statement Brown made was his call on Israel to freeze settlements. In the poverty stricken West Bank, Israeli settlements, equipped with pools, dominate the mountaintops, and the Israeli government has not been freezing settlements. It's hard to imagine peace in the area, though, and few politicians have brave enough to discuss the issue of settlements.

During my time in Israel, I was dismayed by a predominant Israeli ideology that either peace is not possible or that Israel has done all it can towards peace and should do no more. Either way, the peace process is stuck in Israel. Yossi Klein Halevi, senior fellow at the Shalem Center, acknowledged that many Palestinians are being denied human rights, but their leadership left Israel no choice, so, "Too Bad".

Brown doesn't buy the "Too Bad" ideology. He is making bold steps towards reaching peace and ensuring the rights of not just Israelis, but Palestinians as well. It is promising to see a world leader committed to the peace process. Hopefully more will follow.

One Big World

Written by Jackson Wyrick

What in the world could South Central Los Angeles have in common with Northern Ireland and the Palestinian Authority? A funny question I know, but hang with me. These three far apart places might seem completely different at first glance, but there is more to it.

South Central, the P.A., and Northern Ireland are all prime examples of how a lack of trust in law enforcement leads to a breaking point. In South Central, there were the Watts Riots in August of 1965 and more notably the L.A. Riots of 1992. Northern Ireland saw Catholic resentment towards the Royal Ulster Constabulary boil over in the Battle of the Bogside and Bloody Sunday. In the P.A., Palestinian, rose up against Israel in the first and second Intifadas.

Although all three situations are unique in their own rights, there are central themes that can be drawn out. The first is that these uprisings don't spring up overnight. They are breaking points that follow long periods of perceived human or civil rights abuses. Second, uprisings of this nature are only made when the oppressed group feels that progress is not being made in politics or other important arenas.

Let me also underscore some key words in that last paragraph. "Perceived" human or civil rights abuses is important because it is not always indisputable that abuses are occuring. Whether or not abuses are in fact occurring, though, is not important in explaining these breaking points. What is important is that a group of people feels they are being wronged. I'm not trying to justify the Intifadas or the L.A. Riots, just trying to understand why they happened.

In all three places discussed, a group of people felt, or still feels, that the judicial system was not there to look out for them. In protest, they resisted, first against the RUC, then the L.A.P.D., and now the Israeli army. According to Freud, people submit to the authority of groups and governments because they provide them with a sense of security. In the absence of protection from the government, other groups spring up for protection. The IRA, and later the Provisional IRA, would not have had support if it had not been for injustices against Catholics in Northern Ireland. We think of gangs nowadays as all bad, but long before the Crips and the Bloods, Blacks moving into South Central in the late 1940's were subject to abuse from white gangs, so gangs like the Businessmen sprang up to protect themselves and their communities. Indeed, the Economist reports that the majority of Palestinians who voted for Hamas in the last election did so because Fatah was so corrupt and had failed them.

While South Central Los Angeles, Northern Ireland, and the Palestinian Authority are geographically so far, there are common elements that all three areas share. What you might draw from those ties is a matter of opinion, but it seems clear that people, when it comes down to it, aren't so different after all.

Child bride gets divorced after rape, beatings

• Ex-child bride says, "I didn't want to sleep with him, but he forced me to"
  
• Yemeni girl, 10, say she was forced to marry man three times her age
  
• Now divorced, Nujood Ali is one of the few children to speak out against practice
  
• International aid group: More than half of all Yemeni girls are married off before 18
  

By Paula Newton
CNN

Editor's note: CNN does not usually identify children of alleged abuse, but in this case the girl and her family gave CNN permission to tell her story and use her name.

SANAA, Yemen (CNN) -- Nujood Ali is 10 years old, but she already has been married and divorced. It was an arranged marriage in which she said a husband three times her age routinely beat and raped her.

"When I got married, I was afraid. I didn't want to leave home. I wanted to stay with my brothers and sisters and my mom and dad," she said, speaking to CNN with the permission of her parents.

"I didn't want to sleep with him, but he forced me to. He hit me, insulted me."

As she plays marbles with her brothers and sister, Nujood is a portrait of innocence, with a shy smile and a playful nature.

But what happened evokes anger and shame. Asked if what she went through was torture, she nods quietly.

Nujood's parents married her off in February to a man in his 30s whom she describes as old and ugly.

Her parents said they thought they were putting her in the care of her husband's family, but Nujood said he would often beat her into submission.

Nujood then turned to her family for mercy.

"When I heard, my heart burned for her; he wasn't supposed to sleep with her," said Nujood's mother, who asked not to be identified.

But, initially, she also told her daughter she could not help her -- that she belonged to her husband now.

Nujood's father, Ali Mohammed Ahdal, said he is angry about what happened to his daughter. "He was a criminal, a criminal. He did hateful things to her," he said. "He didn't keep his promise to me that he wouldn't go near her until she was 20."

When contacted by CNN, the girl's former husband declined to comment.

Nujood's parents, like so many others in Yemen, struck a social bargain when they decided to have their daughter wed. More than half of all Yemeni girls are married off before the age of 18, according to Oxfam International, a nonprofit group that fights global poverty and injustice.

Many times girls are forced to marry older men, including some who already have at least one wife, Oxfam said. According to tribal customs, the girls are no longer viewed as a financial or moral burden to their parents.

"There is always a fear that the girl will do something to dishonor the family: She will run away with a guy, she will have relations with a boy. So this is always the phobia that the families have," said Suha Bashren of Oxfam International.

Bashren calls the tradition of child brides in Yemen a national crisis. She works with young girls to protect them from early marriage, abuse and one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.

The Yemeni government is holding legal and religious workshops to try to deal with the issue of early marriage. But experts say marrying off a young daughter is generally still seen as the right thing to do.

"A lot of people in the public don't think that this is wrong or that what happened to her was abuse," Bashren said.

In Yemen, there is nothing new or extraordinary about Nujood's story because children have been married off for generations. The country's legal minimum age for marriage was 15 till a decade ago, when the law was changed to allow for children even younger to be wed.

But what is most unusual is that this young girl took such an intensely private dispute and went public with it.

Nujood said she made up her mind to escape from her husband, describing how on a visit to her parents' home she broke free and traveled to the central courthouse across town and demanded to speak to a judge.

"He asked me, 'What do you want?' And I said, 'I want a divorce.' And he said, 'You're married?' And I said, 'Yes,'" she recalled.

What unfolded in those few days in April gripped the country on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula.

Nujood got her divorce, but based on the principles of Islamic Sharia law, her husband was compensated, not prosecuted. Nujood was ordered to pay him more than $200. The human rights lawyer who represented her donated the money.

But for this determined spirit, it was still a sweet victory.

"I did this so that people would listen and think about not marrying their daughters off as young as I was," she said with a shy smile.

Now back at the family home, she said she won't go outside to play -- that all the attention bothers her. Some still condemn the young girl for speaking out, believing that she shouldn't have challenged convention.

Human rights advocates said it will take more than a generation if this practice is to change in Yemen for other children.

"These girls are living in a misery that no one is talking about," Oxfam's Bashren said.

Find this article at: http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/07/15/yemen.childbride/index.html?imw=Y&iref=mpstoryemail

Holocaust siblings meet after 66 years

Holocaust siblings meet after 66 years

• Story Highlights
• Brother, sister meet for first time since 1942, when Nazis separated them
  
• Brother in Ukraine never stopped searching: "Now I truly believe I can die satisfied"
  
• An American Red Cross volunteer helped bring them together
  
• Even after all this time, the siblings don't know what happened to their parents
  

By Matthew Chance
CNN

DONETSK, Ukraine (CNN) -- A frail Irene Famulak clutched her brother on the airport tarmac, her arm wrapped around him in a tight embrace, tears streaming down their faces. It was the first time since 1942 they had seen each other, when she was 17 and he was just 7.

That was the night the invading Nazis came to take her away from her Ukrainian home.

"I remember it well because I kissed him good-bye, and he pushed me away," she said of her brother. "I asked, 'Why did you do that?' And he said that he doesn't like kisses."

"The Nazis told my mother that I was being taken to work in a German labor camp for six months. But it was, of course, much longer. I was there for years."

Both siblings survived the Holocaust and grew up on different sides of the Iron Curtain, not knowing the fate of the other.

But after 66 years apart, Famulak, 83, was reunited with her long lost 73-year-old brother, Wssewolod Galezkij. They held each other close this time, cherishing the moment. Watch siblings hug for first time in seven decades »

"I don't believe anyone has ever known such happiness. Now, I truly believe I can die satisfied," Galezkij said.

Famulak made the long journey to Donetsk in eastern Ukraine from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, after being contacted by the American Red Cross. The organization told her they had located her only surviving sibling.

Famulak said she spent World War II in a labor camp in Munich, Germany, working in the kitchens. She had been taken to the camp with her older sister. When it was liberated in 1945, Famulak stayed in Germany for several years, eventually emigrating to the United States in 1956.

She never saw her parents again after that day in 1942 when Nazis separated her from her family. She and her brother still have no idea what happened to their mother and father. Some of their siblings lived through the war, but later died; others, they never heard from again after being separated.

But her younger brother never gave up hope of tracking his sister down. He, too, was sent to a German labor camp, but after the war, he moved back to Ukraine, then a republic of the Soviet Union. See photos of the "needle in haystack" reunion »

Under Soviet leader Josef Stalin, information on lost relatives was kept sealed, and Galezkij said it wasn't until reforms in the late 1980s, followed by the Soviet collapse, that he started making progress in finding his sister.

Even then, it took him more than 17 years to locate her in the United States. He broke down in tears as he spoke of his overwhelming happiness at finding her.

"When the Red Cross told me they had found her in America, it was such a joy," he said, sobbing.

In fact, he had to be taken to the hospital because he was so overcome when he first learned she was alive. At this week's reunion, there was a doctor on hand at the airport as a precaution.

Back in the United States, there were tears, too.

Linda Klein, the director of the American Red Cross Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center, said the volunteer who helped the siblings find each other got caught up in the emotion herself.

"When I showed her the picture, she stood there and wept," Klein said. "She was beside herself."

Klein's group has reunited 1,500 families since it began work in 1990. She said the former Soviet Union released records in 1989 of concentration camps it liberated, greatly helping organizers find information on Holocaust victims.

The organization has 100 volunteers -- a third of them Holocaust survivors, Klein said. The group also helps families find information about their loved ones who died during the Holocaust. They have brought together more than 50 families this year. All of their work is free. She says it's often like "looking for a needle in a haystack."

"We're playing beat the clock right now," she said, adding, "It's about families that one day they were together and then they were apart."

"When a connection is made, there are just smiles all around."

That was the case for this family in Ukraine. Years of trauma, of separation, of not knowing what happened to loved ones, have been replaced by celebration.

In a picturesque orchard overlooking rolling fields, Galezkij, his wife and their neighbors laid out a feast for his American sister. As the vodka flowed, he told her how he had survived for a lifetime without her.

"He says he always thought he'd see me someday. He dreamt lots about me," Famulak said, as she sat next to her brother.

"And he wrote a song for me. When he went to sleep, he sang every night and cried."

With that, Galezkij, weakened by illness and age, burst into song. But this time, he sang the words with pure joy.

CNN's Michael Sefanov and Wayne Drash contributed to this report.

original link: http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/07/11/holocaust.reunion/index.html

Human Rights Advocate Silenced in China

Voice Seeking Answers for Parents About a School Collapse Is Silenced

By JAKE HOOKER, July 11, 2008, New York Times .com

BEIJING — Three weeks after the earthquake in Sichuan Province, five bereaved fathers whose children died in collapsed schools sought help from a local human rights activist named Huang Qi.

The fathers visited Mr. Huang at the Tianwang Human Rights Center, an informal advocacy organization in the provincial capital of Chengdu, where he worked and lived. They told him how the four-story Dongqi Middle School had crumbled in an instant, burying their children alive.

Mr. Huang soon posted an article on his center’s Web site, 64tianwang.com, describing their demands. They wanted compensation, an investigation into the schools’ construction and for those responsible for the building’s collapse to be held accountable — if there indeed was negligence.

A week later, plainclothes officers intercepted Mr. Huang on the street outside his home and stuffed him into a car. The police have informed his wife and mother that they are holding him on suspicion of illegally possessing state secrets.

“They’ve been using this method for a long time,” said Zhang Jianping, a contributor to the Web site who has known Mr. Huang since 2005. Nobody knows the grounds for his arrest, but many people have the same idea. Mr. Zhang said, “It may be because the schools collapsed, and so many children died.”

In the days after the earthquake, the authorities allowed reporters and volunteers to travel freely in the disaster zone. Some commentators even saw the dawning of a Chinese glasnost. In an interview with National Public Radio that aired in May, Mr. Huang said he believed that the human rights situation in China had greatly improved.

“He actually thought things were heading in the right direction,” said John Kamm, who is pressing for Mr. Huang’s release and is the executive director of the Dui Hua Foundation, which has helped free prominent Chinese political prisoners. “That’s one of the tragedies of his detention.”

A volunteer at the Tianwang center, Pu Fei, 27, was detained minutes after Mr. Huang. He said that the officers who interrogated him demanded that he hand over the password needed to post information on their Web site. They also wanted to know whom Mr. Huang had met and where he had gone in the disaster zone. Mr. Pu was detained in a hotel for two weeks and then released.

Mr. Pu and other volunteers said the authorities might have singled out Mr. Huang because he disseminated information about parents whose children had died in collapsed schools — a group whose protests began to snowball into something like a movement in early June.

There is no official figure on how many children died in schools during the powerful May 12 earthquake. Seven thousand schoolrooms collapsed, according to Chinese government estimates. Thousands of students may have died, if not more, leaving behind bereft parents looking for answers.

During the brief period of openness in late May and early June, parents marched with photos of their children and gathered at the wreckage of schools to hold memorial services. They held sit-ins outside government buildings. In one town, the top Communist Party leader got down on his knees and begged parents to stop a march, but they refused.

But with the Olympic Games in Beijing approaching, the issue increasingly looked like a time bomb for the authorities, and they scurried to defuse it. The Propaganda Department banned coverage of destroyed schools in the domestic press. Paramilitary police officers blocked foreign reporters from demonstrations. Activists who tried to gather and publish information about school construction were detained.

On June 2, The Sichuan Economic Daily published an article saying that substandard construction methods contributed to the deaths of 82 students at a middle school in Yinghua Township. Afterward, an editor at the paper said, two reporters and an editor who worked on that article were fired.

Two fathers of children killed in schools said in separate interviews that officials had told them public gatherings and petitioning the government were no longer permitted. Zeng Hongling, a local crusader who wrote three articles lashing out at the government’s earthquake response, was detained on suspicion of inciting subversion, according to the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, a group based in Hong Kong.

Mr. Huang, who was detained on June 10, has not yet been formally charged with any crime. But if he is convicted on the murky charge of holding state secrets, it will not be his first time being jailed for a political crime.

In 1998, he and his wife, Zeng Li, founded the Tianwang Center for Missing Persons, an organization that focused on cases of human trafficking. Its name later changed to Tianwang Human Rights Center as its mission expanded.

In 1999, she and Mr. Huang helped the police rescue seven girls who had been sold into prostitution. The case gained the Tianwang center favorable attention in the state-run news media.

Mr. Huang also exposed a racket through which thousands of migrant workers sent to work on ocean-going fishing boats had been forced to pay for mandatory appendectomies at a government-run clinic. He published an article on his Web site. His wife said that Mr. Huang’s report stepped on the toes of high-ranking local officials who profited from the arrangement.

Mr. Huang continued to post articles about other taboo topics.

In March 2000, he wrote about a practitioner of the banned spiritual group Falun Gong who was beaten to death in police custody. The Chengdu police shut down his Web site days later, so Mr. Huang moved its content to a server in the United States.

Later that year, he posted an account of a 15-year-old boy who was detained in Chengdu during the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing. The boy later died in police custody.

The police arrested Mr. Huang shortly thereafter. He was held for an extended period without trial, and he was ultimately convicted on charges of inciting subversion and was sentenced to five years in prison. Ms. Zeng, who has lived apart from Mr. Huang since 2006, said the experience changed him.

“When he came out, you could see scars on his head,” she said. “He became irritable, and he would forget things.”

To the surprise of some friends, Mr. Huang took up where he had left off when he got out of prison. He revived his dormant Web site, found citizen journalists throughout China to contribute articles and resumed his role as an activist. “He started helping petitioners — people who had been harmed, people whose homes has been demolished, people whose rights had been abused,” Ms. Zeng said.

State security agents watched him, Ms. Zeng said, but they did not interfere with his work.

Then the earthquake hit, and foreign reporters flooded the devastated towns. Mr. Huang knew the terrain of Sichuan well and did his best to help. He accepted interviews with the foreign press. He and his volunteers rented a truck and handed out bottled water, instant noodles and crackers to refugees. In June, he helped reporters from a British television channel contact parents whose children had been killed in schools destroyed by the earthquake. And he began acting as a clearinghouse of information for reporters.

Mr. Huang kept in touch with the five fathers whose children had died at Dongqi Middle School. They joined a group of experts to investigate the wreckage for clues as to why the building crumbled. Mr. Huang posted a short article on his Web site saying that, according to the experts, the school was structurally unsafe.

It was one of his last postings before his detention. Mr. Huang’s lawyers and family said that the Chengdu police have denied their requests to meet with him on the grounds that his case involves state secrets. Officers with the Wuhou District Public Security Bureau declined to comment, saying they were not authorized to speak with the media.

A conviction for the crime of possessing state secrets can carry up to three years in prison.

It is unclear whether the pressure to arrest him came from central authorities in Beijing or from local officials, who regarded his criticism of the collapsed schools as threatening. Mr. Pu said that some of the officers who interrogated him spoke with a northern Beijing accent, which is unusual in Sichuan, an area with a strong dialect.

original article can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/world/asia/11china.html?ex=1373515200&en=924048ad56677dcf&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

U.S. distances itself from U.N. rights body

Original Article can be found at: http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN06294689

WASHINGTON, June 6 (Reuters) - In an attempt to further distance itself from the U.N. Human Rights Council, the United States said on Friday it would only engage the body when there was an issue of "deep national interest."

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the decision, taken recently by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, reflected mistrust of the 47-member state forum, at which the United States currently has observer status.

"Our skepticism regarding the function of the U.N. Council on Human Rights in terms of fulfilling its mandate and its mission is well known. It has a rather pathetic record," McCormack told reporters.

"We will engage the Human Rights Council really only when we believe that there are matters of deep national interest before the council ... We are going to take a more reserved approach," he added.

Diplomatic sources said the United States had quietly informed Western allies on Friday of its intention to walk away from the council.

"They said they were going to disengage totally," said one representative of a rights watchdog group.

The U.S. delegation has observer status, with the right to speak at the forum when it meets in Geneva. Washington has never stood for election since the council was set up two years ago to replace the widely discredited U.N. Commission on Human Rights.

In a council debate on Friday on the situation in Myanmar, the United States failed to take the floor on a topic on which until now it has always been vocal, a sign that it had little further interest in the body.

Asked about the Myanmar debate, McCormack said Washington would decide on an "ad hoc" basis when to get involved.

The council is seen by critics as having fallen under the control of a bloc of Islamic and African countries, which have a majority when backed by their frequent allies Russia, China and Cuba.

"Instead of focusing on some of the real and deep human rights issues around the world, it has really turned into a forum that seems to be almost solely focused on bashing Israel," said McCormack of the council. (Reporting by Sue Pleming; additional reporting by Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; editing by Eric Beech)
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Human Rights Watch and Human Rights Tribune both condemned the U.S.'s decision in the following articles:
Human Rights Watch Article
Human Rights Tribune Article

Famine Looms as Wars Rend Horn of Africa

May 17, 2008

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

DAGAARI, Somalia — The global food crisis has arrived at Safia Ali’s hut.

She cannot afford rice or wheat or powdered milk anymore.

At the same time, a drought has decimated her family’s herd of goats, turning their sole livelihood into a pile of bleached bones and papery skin.

The result is that Ms. Safia, a 25-year-old mother of five, has not eaten in a week. Her 1-year-old son is starving too, an adorable, listless boy who doesn’t even respond to a pinch.

Somalia — and much of the volatile Horn of Africa, for that matter — was about the last place on earth that needed a food crisis. Even before commodity prices started shooting up around the globe, civil war, displacement and imperiled aid operations had pushed many people here to the brink of famine.

But now with food costs spiraling out of reach and the livestock that people live off of dropping dead in the sand, villagers across this sun-blasted landscape say hundreds of people are dying of hunger and thirst.

This is what happens, economists say, when the global food crisis meets local chaos.
“We’re really in the perfect storm,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, a Columbia economist and top United Nations adviser, who recently visited neighboring Kenya.

There has been a collision of troubles throughout the region: skimpy rainfall, disastrous harvests, soaring food prices, dying livestock, escalating violence, out-of-control inflation, and shrinking food aid because of many of these factors.

Across the border in Ethiopia, in the war-racked Ogaden region, the situation sounds just as dire. In Darfur, the United Nations has had to cut food rations because of a rise in banditry that endangers aid deliveries. Kenya is looking vulnerable, too.

A recent headline in one of Kenya’s leading newspapers blared, “25,000 villagers risk starving,” referring to a combination of drought, higher fertilizer and fuel costs and postelection violence that displaced thousands of farmers. “These places aren’t on the brink,” Mr. Sachs said. “They’ve gone over the cliff.”

Many Somalis are trying to stave off starvation with a thin gruel made from mashed thorn-tree branches called jerrin. Some village elders said their children were chewing on their own lips and tongues because they had no food. The weather has been merciless — intensely hot days, followed by cruelly clear nights.

This week, Saida Mohamed Afrah, another emaciated mother, left her two children under a tree and went scavenging for food and water. When she came back two hours later, her children were dead.

She had little to say about the drought. “I just wish my children had died in my lap,” she said.
The United Nations has declared a wide swath of central Somalia a humanitarian emergency, the final stage before a full-blown famine. But Christian Balslev-Olesen, the head of Unicef operations in Somalia, said the situation was likely to become a famine in the coming weeks.
Famine is defined by several criteria, including malnutrition, mortality, food and water scarcity and destruction of livelihood. Some of those factors, like an acute malnutrition rate of 24 percent in some areas of Somalia, have already soared past emergency thresholds and are closing in on famine range. Mr. Balslev-Olesen said Unicef recently received reports of people dying from hunger and thirst. It is hard to know exactly how many, he said, though local elders have put the number in the mid-hundreds.

“We have all the indicators in place for a catastrophe,” Mr. Balslev-Olesen said. “We cannot call it that yet. But I’m very much concerned it’s just a matter of weeks until we have to.”
Many people already consider Somalia a catastrophe. It has some of the highest malnutrition rates anywhere in the world — in a good year. The collapse of the central government in 1991 plunged Somalia into a spiral of clan-driven bloodshed that it has yet to pull out of. The era began with a famine that killed hundreds of thousands of people.

The consensus now is that all the same elements of the early 1990s — high-intensity conflict, widespread displacement and drought — are lining up again, and at a time of the biggest spike in global food prices in more than 30 years. The United Nations says 2.6 million Somalis need assistance and the number could soon swell to 3.5 million, nearly half the estimated population. If there is excellent rain or a sudden peace, the crisis may ease. But weather projections and even the rosiest political forecasts do not predict that.

Whether Somalia slips into a famine may depend on aid, and right now, that does not look so good either. Eleven aid workers have been killed this year, and United Nations officials say Somalia is as complicated — and dangerous — as ever.

Beyond the warlord and clan fighting, there is now a budding conflict with Western aid workers. The Bush administration has said that terrorists with Al Qaeda are hiding in Somalia, sheltered by local Islamists, and has gone after them with American airstrikes. But a recent American attack on an Islamist leader in Dusa Marreb, a town in the center of the drought zone, has spawned a wave of revenge threats against Western aid workers. The United Nations and private aid organizations say it is now too dangerous to expand their life-saving work in Dusa Marreb.

“We’re in a different contextual environment right now,” said Chris Smoot, the program director for World Vision aid projects in Somalia. He said there were anti-Western “rogue elements that can shut you down, in any shape or form, at any time.”

Aid is also a serious problem in the contested Ogaden region of Ethiopia, across the border from here. A recent report written by a contractor working for the United States Agency for International Development said the drought there was “clearly worsening” and that the response by the Ethiopian government, one of America’s closest allies in Africa, was “absolutely abysmal.”

This may be no accident. The Ethiopian government is struggling with an insurgency in the Ogaden, and the report said that “food is clearly being used as a weapon,” with the government starving out rebel areas, while a mysterious warehouse of American-donated food was discovered across the road from an Ethiopian Army base. “The U.S.G.,” meaning the United States government, “cannot in good conscience allow the food operation to continue in its current manifestation,” the report said. “This situation would be absolutely shameful in any other country.”

The report was not made public, though a copy was provided to The New York Times. When asked about it, a senior American aid official characterized the report as “just a snapshot and one person’s observations and impressions.” But the senior aid official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, also said: “We’re not saying there’s not a crisis in the Ogaden. We’re not saying the Ethiopian response has been satisfactory. But some progress has been made. And we need more.”

Ethiopian officials declined comment and have denied human rights abuses in the Ogaden.
All across this region, one of the poorest of the poor, people are left to the mercies of the desert. In central Somalia, for instance, fewer than five inches of rain have fallen in the past year and a half, aid officials say. The winds are harsh, throats are dry. This area, like much of the Horn of Africa, is too arid for farming. The people here, in lonely outposts like Dagaari, survive by grazing goats, sheep, cattle and camels, selling the animals for money they use to buy food.
“But nobody wants a skinny goat,” explained Abdul Kadir Nur, a herder in Dagaari.

That was about all he had left after the drought killed 400 of his 450 animals.

Not far from the pile of goat bones is a circle of stones. It is the grave of his toddler son.
Mr. Abdul Kadir said the boy had died of hunger and that he had been placed in his grave at an angle, “so he can sleep.”

He walked a few more steps, his flip-flops digging into the crunchy earth. He arrived at Ms. Safia’s hut, where several people were peering in the doorway, watching her sweat on the dirt floor. The nearest hospital was only a half hour away, but nobody had any money to pay for a ride.

“She will most likely die,” an elder said and walked away.

Ms. Safia’s son seemed to sense that. He curled up next to his mother while he still could, his face pressed against the damp cloth that covered her. Her ribs moved up and down, up and down, in quick shallow breaths.

China Investigates Forced Child Labor

May 1, 2008

By DAVID BARBOZA

SHANGHAI — China said Wednesday that it had broken up a child labor ring that forced children from poor, inland areas to work in booming coastal cities, acknowledging that severe labor abuses extended into the heart of its export economy.

Authorities in southern China’s Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong, said they had made several arrests and had already “rescued” more than 100 children from factories in the city of Dongguan, one of the country’s largest manufacturing centers for electronics and consumer goods sold around the world. The officials said they were investigating reports that hundreds of other rural children had been lured or forced into captive, almost slavelike conditions for minimal pay.

The children, mostly between the ages of 13 and 15, were often tricked or kidnapped by employment agencies in an impoverished part of western Sichuan Province called Liangshan and then sent to factory towns in Guangdong, where they were sometimes forced to work 300 hours a month, according to government officials and accounts from the state-owned media. The legal working age in China is 16.

The labor scandal is the latest embarrassment for China as it prepares to host the Olympic Games this summer. For much of the past year, the country has been plagued by damaging reports about severe pollution, dangerous exports, riots in Tibet and the ensuing disruptions to its Olympic torch relay by Tibet’s sympathizers, among other groups.

The abuses may also reflect the combined pressures of worker shortages, high inflation and a rising currency that have reduced profit margins of some Chinese factories and forced them to scramble for an edge — even an illegal one — to stay competitive.

The child labor ring, which was first uncovered by Southern Metropolis, a crusading newspaper based in Guangzhou, came less than a year after China was rocked by exposure of a similar problem in a less developed part of central China. Last June, labor officials in Shanxi and Henan Provinces said they had rescued hundreds of people, including children, from slave labor conditions in rural brick kilns. Many of those workers said they had been kidnapped.

The earlier case, which local officials initially sought to keep quiet, set off a national uproar in China and prompted a sharp response from President Hu Jintao, who vowed a broad crackdown on labor abuses. Local officials in Guangdong may have moved quickly to acknowledge the latest incident to keep it from becoming a running scandal as the Olympics approach.

The police in Guangdong said Wednesday that they had formed teams to search for child laborers in several coastal cities, including Dongguan and Shenzhen, another big manufacturing center, but disclosed nothing about the companies involved in employing the children, or the extent of the problem.

Officials did not identify the specific factories or products involved, and it is unclear whether any of them were suppliers to global corporations. But many companies in Dongguan and Shenzhen, where land and labor costs are typically higher than elsewhere in the country, are part of the supply chain for the country’s export manufacturers. The authorities have also said little so far about the identities of the children they claim to have rescued.

“These youngsters have no ID cards, so it makes it difficult to identify them,” said Zhang Xiang, a spokesman for the Guangdong Labor Bureau.

In recent years, Beijing has stepped up its efforts to crack down on child labor and labor law violations. Last August, Beijing revoked the license of a factory accused of using child labor to produce Olympic merchandise. Several other suppliers were also punished for labor law violations.

But experts say rising costs of labor, energy and raw material, and labor shortages in some parts of southern China have forced some factory owners to cut costs or find new sources of cheap labor, including child labor.

Even factories that supply global companies, including Wal-Mart Stores, have been accused in recent years of using child labor and violating local labor laws. Big corporations have stepped up inspections of factories that produce goods for them. But suppliers have become adept at evading such scrutiny by providing fake wage and work schedule data that suggest they abide by labor laws. Experts say the labor problems discovered in Dongguan are not uncommon.

“The Liangshan child labor case is quite typical,” said Hu Xingdou, a professor of economics and social policy at the Beijing Institute of Technology. “China’s economy is developing at a
fascinating speed, but often at the expense of laws, human rights and environmental protection.”

Professor Hu said that while Beijing had pushed to improve labor conditions throughout the nation, local governments were still driven by incentives to grow their economy, and so they tried to lure cheap labor.

“Most of the work force comes from underdeveloped or poverty-stricken areas,” he said. “Some children are even sold by their parents, who often don’t have any idea of the working conditions.”

In a series of articles this week, journalists working for Southern Metropolis wrote that they had traveled to Liangshan Prefecture in Sichuan Province, an area of western China populated by ethnic minority groups and plagued by drugs and a lack of good jobs, to pose as recruiters and interview parents and residents.

The newspaper said recruiters and labor agencies working in Liangshan often selected and transported children south, where they were then “sold” to factories at virtual auctions in Guangdong Province.

At some coastal factories, children were even lined up and selected based on their body type, wrote the journalists, who also investigated factory areas in Guangdong.

The newspaper also said that children were paid about 42 cents an hour, far below the local minimum wage of about 64 cents an hour. By law, overtime pay is much higher.

Chen Fulin, a government spokesman in Liangshan Prefecture, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that the articles about child labor in Southern Metropolis were accurate.

“So far, we have detected and found four people in Zhaojue County suspected of luring the youngsters from Liangshan to Dongguan and forcing them to work in factories,” he said. “We are dealing with the illegal employment agencies and the labor dealers, according to the law.”
Officials in the city of Dongguan say they are now investigating all factories in the area to determine whether any are employing children.

In its report, Southern Metropolis said some children were threatened with death if they tried to escape.

The newspaper did not identify the coastal factories where the children worked, but the report said that one was a toy factory in Dongguan and that it had not been difficult for the journalists to uncover the labor scandal.

“Since journalists could discover the facts by secret interviews in a few days,” Southern Metropolis wrote in a separate editorial on Tuesday, “how could the labor departments show no interest in it and ignore it for such a long time?”

Chen Yang contributed research.

From Auschwitz, a Torah as Strong as Its Spirit

April 30, 2008
From the NYTimes.com
By JAMES BARRON

The back story of how a Torah got from the fetid barracks of Auschwitz to the ark of the Central Synagogue at Lexington Avenue and 55th Street is one the pastor of the Lutheran church down the street sums up as simply “miraculous.”

It is the story of a sexton in the synagogue in the Polish city of Oswiecim who buried most of the sacred scroll before the Germans stormed in and later renamed the city Auschwitz. It is the story of Jewish prisoners who sneaked the rest of it — four carefully chosen panels — into the concentration camp.

It is the story of a Polish Catholic priest to whom they entrusted the four panels before their deaths. It is the story of a Maryland rabbi who went looking for it with a metal detector. And it is the story of how a hunch by the rabbi’s 13-year-old son helped lead him to it.

This Torah, more than most, “is such an extraordinary symbol of rebirth,” said Peter J. Rubinstein, the rabbi of Central Synagogue. “As one who has gone to the camps and assimilates into my being the horror of the Holocaust, this gives meaning to Jewish survival.”

On Wednesday, the restored Torah will be rededicated in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, which for more than 20 years the congregation of Central Synagogue has observed in conjunction with its neighbor, St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, at Lexington Avenue and 54th Street. The senior pastor, the Rev. Amandus J. Derr, said that next to Easter, the Holocaust memorial is “the most important service I attend every year.”

The Torah from Auschwitz “is a very concrete, tactile piece of that remembrance — of what people, some of whom did it in the name of Christ, did to people who were Jewish,” Pastor Derr said, “and the remembrance itself enables us to be prepared to prevent that from happening again.”

A Torah scroll contains the five books of Moses, and observant Jews read a portion from it at services. Its ornate Hebrew must be hand-lettered by specially trained scribes, and it is considered unacceptable if any part is marred or incomplete. For years, Jews around the world have worked to recover and rehabilitate Torahs that disappeared or were destroyed during the Holocaust, returning them to use in synagogues.

This Torah remained hidden for more than 60 years, buried where the sexton had put it, until Rabbi Menachem Youlus, who lives in Wheaton, Md., and runs the nonprofit Save a Torah foundation, began looking for it about eight years ago. Over two decades, Rabbi Youlus said, the foundation has found more than 1,000 desecrated Torahs and restored them, a painstaking and expensive process. This one was elusive. But Rabbi Youlus was determined.

He had heard a story told by Auschwitz survivors: Three nights before the Germans arrived, the synagogue sexton put the Torah scrolls in a metal box and buried them. The sexton knew that the Nazis were bent on destroying Judaism as well as killing Jews.

But the survivors did not know where the sexton had buried the Torah. Others interested in rescuing the Torah after the war had not found it.

As for what happened during the war, “I personally felt the last place the Nazis would look would be in the cemetery,” Rabbi Youlus said in a telephone interview Tuesday, recalling his pilgrimage to Auschwitz, in late 2000 or early 2001, in search of the missing Torah. “So that was the first place I looked.”

With a metal detector, because, if the story was correct, he was hunting for a metal box in a cemetery in which all the caskets were made of wood, according to Jewish laws of burial. The metal detector did not beep. “Nothing,” the rabbi said. “I was discouraged.”

He went home to Maryland. One of his sons, Yitzchok, then 13, wondered if the cemetery was the same size as in 1939. They went online and found land records that showed that the present-day cemetery was far smaller than the original one.

Rabbi Youlus went back in 2004 with his metal detector, aiming it at the spot where the g’neeza — a burial plot for damaged Torahs, prayer books or other papers containing God’s name — had been. It beeped as he passed a house that had been built after World War II.

He dug near the house and found the metal box. But when he opened it, he discovered the Torah was incomplete. “It was missing four panels,” he said. “The obvious question was, why would the sexton bury a scroll that’s missing four panels? I was convinced those four panels had a story themselves.”

They did, as he learned when he placed an ad in a Polish newspaper in the area “asking if anyone had parchment with Hebrew letters.”

“I said I would pay top dollar,” Rabbi Youlus said. “The response came the next day from a priest. He said, ‘I know exactly what you’re looking for, four panels of a Torah.’ I couldn’t believe it.”

He compared the lettering and the pagination, and paid the priest. (How much, he would not say. The project was underwritten by David M. Rubenstein, a co-founder of the Carlyle Group. Mr. Rubenstein was tied at No. 165 on the Forbes 400 last year with a reported fortune of $2.5 billion; in December, he paid $21.3 million for a 710-year-old copy of the Magna Carta, a British declaration of human rights that served as the foundation for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.)

The priest “told me the panels were taken into Auschwitz by four different people,” Rabbi Youlus said. “I believe they were folded and hidden.” One of the panels contained the Ten Commandments from Exodus, a portion that, when chanted aloud each year, the congregation stands to hear. Another contained a similar passage from Deuteronomy.

The priest, who was born Jewish, was himself an Auschwitz survivor. He told Rabbi Youlus that the people with the four sections of the Torah gave them to him before they were put to death.

“He kept all four pieces until I put that ad in the paper,” Rabbi Youlus said. “As soon as I put that ad in the paper, he knew I must be the one with the rest of the Torah scroll.” (Rabbi Youlus said that the priest has since died.)

Rabbi Youlus said that nearly half the Torah’s lettering needed repair, work that the foundation has done over the past few years. Thirty-seven letters were left unfinished: 36, or twice the number that symbolizes “life” in Hebrew, will be filled in by members of the congregation before the service on Wednesday, the 37th at the ceremony.

Rabbi Youlus called it “a good sturdy Torah, even if it hasn’t been used in 65 years.” The plan is to make it available every other year to the March of the Living, an international educational program that arranges for Jewish teenagers to go to Poland on Holocaust Remembrance Day, to march from Auschwitz to its companion death camp, Birkenau.

“This really is an opportunity to look up to the heavens and say, he who laughs last, laughs best,” Rabbi Youlus said. “The Nazis really thought they had wiped Jews off the face of the earth, and Judaism. Here we are taking the ultimate symbol of hope and of Judaism and rededicating it and using it in a synagogue. And we’ll take it to Auschwitz. You can’t beat that.”

Chinese Students in U.S. Fight View of Their Home

April 29, 2008
By SHAILA DEWAN

LOS ANGELES — When the time came for the smiling Tibetan monk at the front of the University of Southern California lecture hall to answer questions, the Chinese students who packed the audience for the talk last Tuesday had plenty to lob at their guest:
If Tibet was not part of China, why had the Chinese emperor been the one to give the Dalai Lama his title? How did the tenets of Buddhism jibe with the “slavery system” in Tibet before China’s modernization efforts? What about the Dalai Lama’s connection to Hitler?

As the monk tried to rebut the students, they grew more hostile. They brandished photographs and statistics to support their claims. “Stop lying! Stop lying!” one young man said. A plastic bottle of water hit the wall behind the monk, and campus police officers hustled the person who threw it out of the room.

Scenes like this, ranging from civil to aggressive, have played out at colleges across the country over the past month, as Chinese students in the United States have been forced to confront an image of their homeland that they neither recognize nor appreciate. Since the riots last month in Tibet, the disrupted Olympic torch relays and calls to boycott the opening ceremony of the Games in Beijing, Chinese students, traditionally silent on political issues, have begun to lash out at what they perceive as a pervasive anti-Chinese bias.

Last year, there were more than 42,000 students from mainland China studying in the United States, an increase from fewer than 20,000 in 2003, according to the State Department.
Campuses including Cornell, the University of Washington in Seattle and the University of California, Irvine, have seen a wave of counterdemonstrations using tactics that seem jarring in the American academic context. At the University of Washington, students fought to limit the Dalai Lama’s address to nonpolitical topics. At Duke, pro-China students surrounded and drowned out a pro-Tibet vigil; a Chinese freshman who tried to mediate received death threats, and her family was forced into hiding.

And last Saturday, students from as far as Florida and Tennessee traveled to Atlanta to picket CNN after a commentator, Jack Cafferty, referred to the Chinese as “goons and thugs.” (CNN said he was referring to the government, not the people.)

The student anger, stoked through e-mail messages sent to large campus mailing lists, stems not so much from satisfaction with the Chinese government but from shock at the portrayal of its actions, as well as frustration over the West’s long-standing love affair with Tibet — a love these students see as willfully blind.

By and large, they do not acknowledge the cultural and religious crackdown in Tibet, insisting that ordinary Tibetans have prospered under China’s economic development, and that only a small minority are unhappy.

“Before I came here, I’m very liberal,” said Minna Jia, a graduate student in political science at U.S.C. who encouraged fellow students to attend the monk’s lecture. “But after I come here, my professor told me that I’m nationalist.”

“I believe in democracy,” Ms. Jia added, “but I can’t stand for someone to criticize my country using biased ways. You are wearing Chinese clothes and you are using Chinese goods.”

Students interviewed for this article deplored the more extreme expressions of anger, like death threats against the Duke freshman and the tossing of the water bottle, and pointed out that Chinese students had little experience in the art of protest. But, they said, they could also understand them.

“We’ve been smothered for too long time,” said Jasmine Dong, another graduate student who attended the U.S.C. lecture.

By that, Ms. Dong did not mean that Chinese students had been repressed or censored by their own government. She meant that the Western news media had not acknowledged the strides China had made or the voices of overseas Chinese. “We are still neglected or misunderstood as either brainwashed or manipulated by the government,” she said.

No matter what China does, these students say, it cannot win in the arena of world opinion. “When we have a billion people, you said we were destroying the planet./ When we tried limiting our numbers, you said it is human rights abuse,” reads a poem posted on the Internet by “a silent, silent Chinese” and cited by some students as an accurate expression of their feelings. “When we were poor, you thought we were dogs./ When we loan you cash, you blame us for your debts./ When we build our industries, you called us polluters./ When we sell you goods, you blame us for global warming.”

Rather than blend in to the prevailing campus ethos of free debate, the more strident Chinese students seem to replicate the authoritarian framework of their homeland, photographing demonstration participants and sometimes drowning out dissent.

A Tibetan student who declined to be identified for fear of harassment said he decided not to attend a vigil for Tibet on his campus, which he also did not want identified because there are so few Tibetans there. “It’s not that I didn’t want to, I really did want to go — it’s our cause,” he said. “At the same time, I have to consider that my family’s back there, and I’m going back there in May.”

Another factor fueling the zeal of many Chinese demonstrators could be that they, too, intend to return home; the Chinese government is widely believed to be monitoring large e-mail lists.
Universities have often tried to accommodate the anger of their Chinese students. Before the Dalai Lama’s visit to the University of Washington, the campus Chinese Students and Scholars Association wrote to the university president expressing hopes that the visit would focus only on nonpolitical issues and not arouse anti-China sentiments. According to a posting on the group’s Web site, the university president, Mark A. Emmert, told them in a meeting that no political questions would be raised at the Dalai Lama’s speech. A spokesman said the university, which opened an office in Beijing last fall, had prescreened student questions before the Chinese students voiced their concerns.

Some experts say that colleges feel constrained from reining in the more extreme protests through a combination of concerns about cultural sensitivity and a desire to expand their own ties with China.

“I think there tends to be a great deal of self-censorship,” said Peter Gries, director of the Institute for U.S.-China Issues at the University of Oklahoma, “and not just among American China scholars but among the whole web of people who do business with China, including school administrators.”

At the U.S.C. lecture, the Chinese students arrived early to distribute handouts on Tibet and China that contained a jumble of abbreviated history, slogans and maps with little context. A chart showing that infant mortality in Tibet had plummeted since 1951, when the Communist Chinese government asserted control, did not provide any means for comparison with mortality rates in China or other countries.

One photograph showed the Dalai Lama with Heinrich Harrer, author of “Seven Years in Tibet” and a one-time member of the Nazi Party — hence the question about the Dalai Lama’s connection to Hitler, who died when the Dalai Lama was nine. The question about slavery referred to the feudal system in place in Tibet until the mid-20th century. Another photograph purported to show a Tibetan drum that, according to the caption, was covered with “a virgin girl’s skin.”

The students said they were frustrated by a sense that many accounts of the recent riots did not reflect the violence and destruction by the Tibetan protesters, who vandalized shops owned by Han Chinese (the ethnic majority in China). According to official Chinese news sources, 22 died in the rioting.

Much of the anger has the tenor of disillusionment. During the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, the Western news media was seen as a source of otherwise elusive truth.
“We thought Western media is very objective,” said Chou Wu, a 28-year-old working on his doctorate in material science, “and what it turned out is that Western media is even more biased than Chinese media. They’re no better, and even more, they’re against us.”

Students argue that China has spent billions on Tibet, building schools, roads and other infrastructure. Asked if the Tibetans wanted such development, they looked blankly incredulous. “They don’t ask that question,” said Lionel Jensen, a China scholar at Notre Dame. “They’ve accepted the basic premise of aggressive modernization.”

That may be, some experts suggest, because the students whose families can afford to send them abroad are the ones who have benefited the most from China’s economic liberalization.
Spring Zheng, 27, another graduate student at U.S.C., dismissed the notion that her patriotism stemmed from the government’s efforts to use the schools to instill national pride, particularly after Tiananmen Square.

Rather, Ms. Zheng said, “We have witnessed with our own eyes about the rapid change of China. China is developing fast, and Chinese people’s lives” are “becoming better and better, fast.”

As the U.S.C. session wound to a close, the organizer, Lisa Leeman, a documentary film instructor, pleaded for a change in tone. “My hope for this event, which I don’t totally see happening here, is for people on both, quote, sides to really hear each other and maybe learn from each other,” Ms. Leeman said. “Are there any genuine questions that don’t stem from a political point of view, that are really not here to be on a soap box?”

At that moment, the bottle hit the wall.

Michael Anti contributed reporting from Cambridge, Mass.

Olympic Torch Relay Faces Protests

From the New York Times

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

April 8, 2008
Olympic Torch Relay in Paris Halted as Protests Spread
By KATRIN BENNHOLD and JOHN F. BURNS

PARIS — What was supposed to be a majestic procession for the Olympic torch through the French capital turned into chaos Monday as thousands of people from around Europe, many with Tibetan flags, massed to protest the passage of the flame. The torch went out several times, and police officers had to put it onto a bus to try to protect it as demonstrators swarmed the security detail. In the end, organizers canceled the final leg of the procession.

A police spokeswoman, speaking on the condition of anonymity in accordance with policy, said the torch went out “for technical reasons” unrelated to the protests, without offering further clarification. CNN reported that the torch was extinguished at least twice amid the melee, and The Associated Press said officials were forced to extinguish the flame five times to carry it in the safety of the bus.

Despite tremendous security, at least two protesters got within almost an arm’s length of the flame before they were grabbed by police officers, The A.P. reported. Officers tackled numerous protesters to the ground and carried some away.

It was yet another unscripted moment in the passage of the Olympic flame, and the second time in two days that the torch relay had been disrupted in a European capital.

Some 3,000 police officers in Paris — on foot, horseback, in-line skates and motorbikes and even in boats on the Seine — tried to prevent a repeat of the scenes in London on Sunday, when the torch’s progression through the streets turned into a tumult of scuffles. One man broke through a tight security cordon in the London protests and made a failed grab for the torch, and 35 people were arrested.

China’s official Xinhua news agency on Monday condemned the “vile misdeeds” of protesters in London.

Before the torch encountered problems in France, a spokeswoman in Beijing for the city’s Olympic organizing committee said at a hurriedly organized news conference that the relay would continue on its international route regardless of protests. “The torch represents the Olympic spirit, and people welcome the torch,” said Wang Hui, the spokeswoman.

The news conference was apparently intended to address Sunday’s protests in London. Ms. Wang blamed the disruptions in London on a “few Tibet separatists” and described their actions as the work of saboteurs. She said Beijing’s Olympic organizers “strongly condemned” the Tibetan protesters.

“The general public is very angry at this sabotage by a few separatists,” she said. “During the torch relay, we met with some disturbances, but we believe that all the peace-loving people in the world will support the torch relay.”

Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, used a meeting in Beijing to criticize the London protests, but also to call for a rapid and peaceful solution to confrontations in Tibet.

French authorities appeared determined to try to spare China — and Paris —embarrassment or disorder similar to London’s, resorting to measures normally reserved for a visiting head of state. A police helicopter circled overhead, for example. Their efforts drew scorn from the French protesters who angrily noted the heavy police presence.

Officers with machine guns guarded sensitive Metro exits along the 17-mile route.

“One would almost think oneself in Lhasa,” said Jean-Paul Ribes, leader of the Support Committee of the Tibetan People in France, who was among the thousands massed on the Trocadero square, across the Seine from the Eiffel tower, where the flame began its passage through Paris. “It snowed last night, now the sky is blue — and police are everywhere,” Mr. Ribes said.

Many protesters — demonstrating against China’s human rights policies in general, or for a free Tibet, or simply for a boycott of the Olympics in Beijing — echoed a headline emblazoned across the front page of the left-wing daily Liberation, under a picture of the Olympic rings restyled as handcuffs: “Liberate The Olympic Games!”

Protesters came from all around Europe, including four busloads from Belgium. Lobsang Dechen, a 29-year-old Tibetan refugee living in Belgium for 4 ½ years, said Europeans should help the cause of Tibet by boycotting the Games. ‘’China does not deserve to be the host,” she said. ‘’They have to first learn to respect human rights in Tibet.’

Kevin Khayat, 19, a design student in Paris and a member of the International Federation for Human Rights, said sports should be separated from politics. “I am against a boycott, and in favor of human rights,” he said. He handed stickers to demonstrators urging: “Let’s keep our eyes open.”

In London on Sunday, the torch was relayed on a seven-hour journey from the new Wembley soccer stadium in the city’s northwest to the principal site for the 2012 Summer Olympics in Stratford in the east.

Along the way, numerous protesters seeking to reach the torch were wrestled to the ground by police officers. One man carrying a fire extinguisher narrowly failed to reach the person carrying the torch, but he set off the extinguisher anyway, dousing police officers with foam.

The torch’s London relay was the fourth stop of a global itinerary that began last month in Greece, where pro-Tibetan demonstrators briefly interrupted the torch’s lighting and its subsequent progress through Athens.

Tibetan organizations have said they plan protests at every stop on the torch’s 21-nation tour. After Paris, it moves to San Francisco, its only American stop, on Wednesday. The monthlong tour is scheduled to end in Vietnam; it is to be followed by a six-week, 46-stop tour of China.

The tour could prove jarring for Beijing. What organizers had billed as an occasion to celebrate the Olympics’ sporting ideals of peace and harmony is turning into a contest between China’s supporters and critics.

In London, more than 2,000 police officers were deployed; the security cordon around the torch was so dense that the flame and those carrying it were often barely visible to crowds.

Caught in the middle are foreign governments. Both Britain and France sought to protect delicate trade and diplomatic relations with China while supporting the Games and yet to also placate those who oppose holding the Olympics in a country with a harsh record for punishing dissent. The centerpiece of the torch parade Sunday was 10 Downing Street, where the Chinese contingent was greeted by Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Mr. Brown, like President Bush, has said he plans to attend the Games’ opening ceremonies in Beijing in August. That stand has drawn contrasts with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who has hinted he may not attend if China’s recent crackdown on Tibetans does not relent.

Under pressure from human rights groups in Britain, Mr. Brown has voiced sympathy for the Tibetan protests. He has also said that he will meet the Dalai Lama in Britain next month, and that he has informed China’s leaders.

The most intense scuffles in London occurred as the torch moved through the heart of the city. The torch, which was carried by a chain of British sports heroes and television celebrities, was protected by an inner guard of Chinese security men in blue and white Olympic tracksuits and an outer cordon of yellow-jacketed British police officers. Some were on foot, while others rode bicycles, motorbikes or horses.

For one long stretch, where streets narrowed and crowds were heavy, the torch was placed in the back of a single-decker bus and driven past the crowds until the police judged it safe for the runners to resume.

The warmest reception for the torch came as it passed through the Chinatown area of central London -- a diversion adopted to let the Chinese ambassador to Britain carry the torch.

A Chinese spokesman, Qu Yingpu, said Chinese officials were grateful to the police “for their efforts to keep order.” He added: “This is not the right time, the right platform, for any people to voice their political views.”

One protester who broke through the police cordon, David Allen, said his anger flared at the sight of British sports stars being guarded in London by Chinese security men.

“It makes us complicit in the regime’s repression,” Allen said. ”You have to ask: Where were these security men last week? Beating up people in the villages of China, no doubt.”

Katrin Bennhold reported from Paris, and John F. Burns from London. Jim Yardley contributed reporting from Beijing.

Cesar Chavez march

Cesar Chavez Pilgrimage March on Saturday, April 5

On Behalf Of OPR Pitzer Office of Public Relations

Speakers, Singers, and Music to Highlight Cesar Chavez Pilgrimage March

As part of celebrating the legacy of civil rights leader Cesar Chavez,
the Latina/o Roundtable and LCLAA (Labor Council for Latin American
Advancement) are holding the sixth annual Cesar Chavez Pilgrimage
March on Saturday April 5, beginning at 9:30 a. m., from Pomona City
Hall (Mission and Garey) to Cesar Chavez Park (Valley Blvd. and 57
Freeway). The speakers include: Paul Chavez, son of Cesar Chavez and
President of the National Farmworker's Service Center, Amanda Figueroa,
SEIU United Long Term Care Worker's Secretary-Treasurer, and Father
Patricio Guillen. The musical groups include: La Paz, a hip-hop group
from the farmworker movement; Trio del Pueblo, a group celebrating its
20 years of presentations throughout the Southwest and Mexico; and Las
Hermanas Arteaga, three Latina women singers from the city of Pomona.


Throughout the history of Cesar Chavez's community organizing efforts,
he used long pilgrimages as a means of bringing attention to the many
issues facing our communities. As part of commemorating the life of
Cesar Chavez, the pilgrimage march in Pomona will remember his legacy
through promoting non-violence and peace in our communities and abroad,
using our lives in building unity among people of all backgrounds, and
in supporting legalization rights for immigrants. The march will begin
at Pomona city hall with speakers and music. The procession will
proceed on the sidewalk west on Mission Blvd. to White Ave., North on
White Ave., and East on Holt Ave. (which becomes Valley Blvd. to Cesar
Chavez Park. The march will end at Cesar Chavez park with speakers,
musical groups, and poetry. The celebration is co-sponsored by the
Pomona Economic Opportunity Center and Campus Life Committee.

Modern Slaves: An Interview with Benjamin Skinner

From Salon.com

Hardly a thing of the past, slavery thrives in our world. Investigative reporter Benjamin Skinner tells Salon the shocking truth about human trafficking.

By Hannah Wallace

Mar. 27, 2008 | During the four years that Benjamin Skinner researched modern-day slavery for his new book, "A Crime So Monstrous," he posed as a buyer at illegal brothels on several continents, interviewed convicted human traffickers in a Romanian prison and endured giardia, malaria, dengue and a bad motorcycle accident. But Skinner, an investigative journalist, is most haunted by his experience in a seedy brothel in Bucharest, Romania, where he was offered a young woman with Down syndrome in exchange for a used car.

"There are more slaves today than at any point in human history," writes Skinner, citing a recent estimate that there are currently 27 million worldwide. One hundred and forty-three years after the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed in 1865 and 60 years after the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights banned the slave trade worldwide, slavery -- or, as it is euphemistically called, human trafficking -- is actually thriving. It is, as Hillary Clinton has said, "the dark underbelly of globalization."

That slavery in its many forms -- debt bondage, forced domestic servitude and forced prostitution -- still exists is, indeed, shocking, mostly because it is invisible to those of us who don't know where to look for it. Skinner's great achievement is that he shines a light on the international slave trade, exposing the horrors of bondage not only through assiduous reporting and interviews with modern-day abolitionists and government officials, but by sharing the stories of several survivors. These poignant tales -- of people like Muong, a 12-year-old Dinka boy from southern Sudan, who is abducted (with his brother and mother) by an Arab slave driver; Tatiana, an Eastern European woman who is tricked into slavery when her boyfriend of six months finds her an "au pair" job in Amsterdam; and Gonoo, an Indian man in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh who inherits a debt from his father and spends his days working it off at a stone quarry -- illustrate the harsh realities of slavery while also offering some hope that former slaves can rebuild their lives.

Salon sat down with Skinner to talk about modern-day abolitionists, what's wrong with redemptions (also called "buy backs"), and why he's optimistic that slavery can be eradicated.

You infiltrated many dangerous underworlds to get these stories, often putting your life at risk by chatting up child slave brokers and negotiating to buy young women from a Russian mobster in Istanbul who'd just been released from prison. Which situation, in retrospect, was the most harrowing?

There were definitely some moments where I felt I'd made a mistake in terms of personal safety. At this point, though, I have to say that the people who are most in danger in these situations are the slaves themselves. My greatest concern going in was not "Am I going to come out whole?" but "Is there going to be some retaliation against the slaves if my cover is blown?"

I had a principle that I would not pay for a human life. You buy a human being and you can't just set them free and dump them on the economy with no resources, no support system, no rehabilitation.

When I was offered this young woman in trade for a used car at the Romani brothel in Bucharest, I could have done one of a few things: I could've paid to redeem her. I was with a couple of guys and I could've fought physically with the traffickers to get her out. Or I could've gone to the police the next day to tell them, which is what I did.

Very unsatisfying, that. You want to rip this guy's head off, right? I was shown this woman who had scars all over her arm -- she was clearly trying to kill herself to escape daily rape, and she had Down syndrome. I was so in shock. I was undercover and I had this moment where I thought, "What would my character be doing in this situation?" So I tried to smile. And I physically couldn't. I was so horrified. I looked at my translator, who had not done this kind of work before, and there was just sheer horror on his face as well. To see somebody who is in such a condition. They had put makeup on her and her makeup was running because she was crying so much.

Did the police do anything?

The response from the police was, "These are the Roma, they have their laws, they have their blood." The Roma are this incredibly oppressed and marginalized community within Romania -- and have been for centuries. That's why, I think, the major human traffickers in Romania over the past several years have been Roma.

I kept thinking of Samantha Power's book as I was reading this because you describe the reluctance of government officials to use the term "slavery" to describe what is obviously exactly that. (Power describes the same studied avoidance of the word "genocide" in "A Problem From Hell.") Colin Powell didn't use "slavery" in 2001 when he released the first Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report. Even the major piece of U.S. anti-slavery legislation, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, doesn't use the word "slavery."

There are over a dozen universal conventions and over 300 international treaties that have been signed banning slavery and the slave trade. We've all agreed that this is a crime of universal concern and it requires a robust response to stop it.

The U.S. has actually gotten better at using the term "slavery" when it's appropriate. One group that has not gotten better in this regard -- they've taken baby steps -- has been the U.N. They are so tepid and afraid of offending member states. Even in a case like Sudan, which was as egregious a form of slavery and slave raiding as you've had in the late 20th century. In 1999, at the height of slave raiding, the U.N. Human Rights Commission said, "OK, we will no longer refer to slavery, we will refer to intertribal abductions." And if you talk to U.N. officials behind the scenes, they'll say that the logic behind this is that in order to move the issue forward, we had to be diplomatic and reach this middle ground. The problem with that logic is that you lose all leverage. Abduction is not a crime against humanity -- slavery is. If it's a crime against humanity, you get hit pretty hard.

How would you get hit very hard?

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 4, says slavery and the slave trade are banned worldwide. But actually, you're bringing up a good point. In terms of enforcement, the U.N. doesn't have the kind of systems built into it which can really deal with this, and that's a problem.

The U.N., which has, as part of its original mandate, the eradication of slavery and the slave trade, finds itself now at a stage where there are more slaves today than at any point in human history. And it really makes you question the viability of the model and the strength of the system.

There are philosophical differences about how to combat slavery. Some people, such as Michael Horowitz (the neocon abolitionist), have focused exclusively on sex trafficking, hoping there will be a "ripple effect" with other forms of slavery such as debt bondage and forced domestic servitude.

Nonsense.

But how do you explain this myopia? You cite so much research that shows that the other forms of slavery are even more prevalent -- in the U.S., you say, less than half of American slaves are forced prostitutes.

I don't think enough reports have come out and the ones that have come out haven't been in the right places. I think when you start getting the 700 Club talking about how the slavery of a young man in a quarry in India -- or in a brick kiln or on a farm -- is equivalent to the slavery of the Israelites and you start quoting Bible verses, then maybe we'll be getting somewhere.

Another philosophical divide among modern-day abolitionists has to do with the role of poverty. The late Senator Wellstone, who co-sponsored the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000, was adamant that poverty was a central factor but Horowitz disagreed, vehemently. Why do you think that is? It seems so obvious that poverty is the very reason so many people are forced and hoodwinked into slavery.

Paul Wellstone's view of this was basically that you can't address slavery without having targeted anti-poverty programs. When I presented this to Horowitz, he slammed his desk and said something to the effect of "The Paul Krugmans of the world would love for this to be a means for me redistributing my income to Sri Lanka." And I'll give him this: I understand his point that the end of slavery cannot wait for the end of poverty. That's not what I'm calling for and I don't think that's what Senator Wellstone was calling for.

But if you don't recognize that the primary driver of slavery today is the nexus between withering poverty of extreme marginalized communities with unscrupulous criminals, and you don't address both sides of it -- the criminal side and the socioeconomic side -- you're not going to solve this problem. As long as there's a ready source of people who are so desperate for survival that they will sell their children into slavery, as long as you don't address that, you will always have slavery. And I fundamentally feel that slavery can be ended.

Do you think the TVPA's three-tiered anti-slavery system, which evaluates countries' efforts to eradicate slavery and imposes non-trade sanctions on those who don't do anything to abolish it, works?

I think it's a good thing, but I honesty feel it has outlived its usefulness. You can only slap a country lightly on its wrists so many times and have them notice. After a while it totally loses its effectiveness.


Let's talk about the practice of Redemptions. Are these still going on and is it a viable way to chip away at slavery, buying a slave's freedom one at a time?

There's a long history of it, and not all of it is bad. I find it a very imperfect and unjust way of freeing people. You are essentially acknowledging the right of property in man, by buying them. In recent history, I can't think of any instances where it has worked and been unproblematic.

It's mostly happening in Sudan, right?

New York Times columnist Nick Kristof did it, of course, in Cambodia where he went in and bought two girls in a brothel. And he went back a year later and found that one of the girls was back in the brothel and hooked on methamphetamines.

To take our own history, Lincoln had contemplated buying all slaves from their masters and then setting them free in either Haiti or Liberia. But I think at a certain point -- and I defer to civil war scholars on this -- he realized that this was very much an imperfect justice and what needed to happen was the remaking, through force, of a society that would acknowledge that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, which was the initial promise, of course, of the Declaration of Independence.

What you have in Sudan are these evangelicals coming over with tons of hard currency in the middle of a war zone, going to one of the combatants -- in particular, one small faction of the combatants -- and saying, "OK, here's a ton of money, now go get us some slaves."

Basically funding the militia.

Exactly. And even if every one of those people was a slave and everything was on the up and up ... the devil is in the details.

You'd think that the hardest part would be freeing slaves. But once they're free, their lives are never easy. At one point in the Sudan section you say "free, but free to starve." What seems to you the best solution for helping former slaves deal with their new-found freedom?

Giving them some access to credit, healthcare, property rights and education. And psychological help.

In many of these far-off places where I was, the arbiters of law -- the people who set the rules -- are people who are benefiting from a slave economy. As long as that's the situation, you need to break the grip of those people over the system.

In your epilogue, you say, "George W. Bush did more to free modern-day slaves than any other president." However, you also criticize the Bush administration for focusing on sex trafficking to the exclusion of other forms of bondage.

The bar isn't very high. Only at the end of the Clinton years was there a recognition on the part of the executive branch that this was really an issue. But Bush deserves credit. He did more to free slaves than any president in modern history. But history doesn't grade on a curve on the subject of abolition. And he could have and should have done much more -- there's no question. The fact that there was such a narrow focus really hamstrung his efficacy on this.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has called trafficking "the dark underbelly of globalization."


Which presidential candidate -- Clinton, Obama or McCain -- do you think is most passionate about abolishing modern-day slavery?

Listen, I'm not going to give Obama a pass on this. It's not clear to me that he cares about modern-day slavery -- he hasn't said a word about it. And Hillary has, certainly in the last couple of years. Though not on the trail.

But I think it is a mistake to make this a campaign issue. I think it has to be a big piece of our American foreign policy platform. It needs to be fundamentally a central piece of any meaningful new American foreign policy.

And what about John McCain?

Well, he blurbed my book. John McCain is very close with John Miller, the former head of the TIP office, which is a good sign. But no, he hasn't been a leader on this.

One of the things I found hopeful about the book is that while it's important to make policy changes and create tough anti-slavery laws, NGOs and individuals clearly play a vital role in exposing slavery. People like Rampal in India (the activist who runs Sankalp) and the Amsterdam taxi driver who helps Kayta, a sex slave, buy her freedom. So the role of the individual is important.

It is, it's extremely important. If there's a critical thing from that U.S. chapter that I was trying to get across, it's that this doesn't have to be some kind of neo-McCarthyism where you are spying on your neighbors, but just be aware of what's going on in your community.

I talk about three things that individuals can and should do. The first is becoming conscious of the reality of slavery -- becoming more attuned to the signs of what may be a trafficking or slavery situation. A key part of that is getting educated about slavery. The second thing is pressing elected officials and candidates for office on what they're going to do about it -- what creative approaches they have for combatting modern-day slavery and ending it within a generation. The third things is supporting groups like Free the Slaves (Kevin Bales' group) and Anti-Slavery International.


Abolishing slavery is clearly an all-consuming issue, something that often drives people who are involved with it to burn out or go crazy or both. How have you kept your sanity during the four years of researching this book?

The question is really how these people that operate at the pointed end of the spear keep their sanity. And the people who run trafficking shelters in Romania -- who have weekly or monthly threats from traffickers -- how they keep their sanity. For me it was much easier. You go into these situations and certainly it stays with you. When you meet somebody like this young woman in the Bucharest brothel or Gonoo or the trafficker in Haiti who offered to sell me a child for $50.

What drove you to take on this project?

You could say that abolition is in my blood. My great-great-grandfather fought with the Union Army in the Siege of Petersburg [Va.]. His uncle was a rabble-rousing abolitionist in Connecticut. And I was raised Quaker. The Quakers were the heart of the abolitionist movement in the late 18th century, early 19th century.

Fast-forward to 1999. I read Kevin Bales' "Disposable People," which is an incredibly good, earnest take on modern-day slavery worldwide. Bales' estimate of total number of slaves was 27 million -- a staggering number. The one thing that I wanted to do was to put a human face on that: to tell the stories of the slaves, the slave masters and the slave traders. And to tell the stories of those who try to free them.



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